So what? It's an asset worth 6 figures that will likely be re-sold during its useful lifetime. Depreciation matters. You expect a house to at least hold its value over time.

I know people who spend a few hundred per year to have the latest MacBooks, buying the new model with every release and selling the old one. Laptops aren't investments, either, but resale value matters.

It's probably also worth pointing out another huge cost: medical insurance. Lee Iacocca (former Chrysler chairman) complained that employee medical insurance cost ~$1250 per car, whereas Toyota Japan paid around $250 per car (read it a while ago and too lazy to get the exact figures right now). He also stated they paid out more to Blue Shield than they spent on steel, rubber, etc.

A good chunk of this is that companies _start_ from the position that they want to hire H1B. Then, to comply with H1B requirements, they create job listings that they know they won't be able to fill. When they fail to fill the positions, they can get H1Bs for people who say they meet the requirements. Approved! It's amazing how many people in India have 20 years of Java experience...

And yes, I have friends who specialize in this little corner of law.

That's based on a very restricted view of "illegal alien". Though they may be a minority, there are plenty who are currently here illegally (or undocumented) who are well educated.

The two I am personally aware of are those who have overstayed their visas and those who were brought here as small children, but grew up as Americans.

I agree that it is better for society if we teach these things, and that people need to learn them. Not everyone needs to know how to do a complex tax return or be a CPA, but they should have a basic understanding of the fundamentals.

All that said, I never took a class for any of this. I didn't need to. Not because I came out of the womb fully formed, but because I am a curious person who wants to learn and improve myself. I got books, used the internet, and figured it out.

What's pathetic is not that children need to learn these things, but that so few have bothered to self-teach anything of import. Why don't we have a culture of learning? Why are so few financially responsible? Why do kids graduate highschool with iPhones, iPods, iPads, and laptops, yet no savings accounts? Why is it socially acceptable for a 20-something to be unable to cook, clean, do laundry, or maintain a budget?

I won't say whether past generations were better. But I will say that ours should be.

I'm shocked someone else actually posted this on slashdot. My thoughts exactly.

I'd mod you up if I wasn't already commenting here.

... and traditional banks have reserve requirements and deposit insurance. And systems in place to monitor their reserves. And regulators to ensure they're actually following some of the rules.

Bitcoin suffers from the same problems the USD and banking system used to: wild fluctuations, crashes, bubbles, terrible banks, and inherent deflation. The difference is that bitcoin can't be fixed.

Agree with you on the waste, but probably worth noting that the US also has extremely productive industry and agriculture... which both (IIRC) tend to use much more water than households.

Funny enough, I actually remember reading your post. You left out "PowerShell (like all of MS) has overly cumbersome syntax".

That said, the meaning of my comment was more of "I would rather be unemployed for a while than have to use PowerShell on a regular basis".

Agreed. And even more amusing to me, I've seen plenty of humanities-majoring college students using spaces.

Lack of workspaces is one of my main complaints with Windows.. and has been for about 10 years now.

How to remove all bundled Modern apps from your user account in Windows 8 in link form for the copy-paste impaired.

Thank you. I've been meaning to do this on a new base image.

This has been my experience as well. It's an even larger pain with VMs.

I made a longer post about this a while back, but... agreed. I hate Metro on 8, hate 8 overall, but the interface on 2012 isn't a problem for me. It's easier than digging through multiple layers of the start menu.

Though Windows is not my specialty. I have to admin a few as part of my job, but if they tried to make me work in powershell I would just quit.

You're telling me that Netflix pays $100,000 for new media every time a copy is lost in the mail... rather than having some term in their contract that allows them to purchase new media for $10? Sure.

Bollocks. Nuclear is artificially cheap due to a combination of subsidies and liability exemptions.

With any luck, they'll be for self-driving cars. From the demos I've seen, it looks like you could squeeze a few lanes worth of human-driven traffic into one dedicated automated driving lane. If you don't let humans in, they can safely go 80 mph nearly bumper to bumper.